Auto-Destructive Art
From Planet 222
Break a Small Piece of My Heart
by Charmian Savill
Charmian Savill reviews the recent Ivor Davies retrospective ‘Silent Explosion’, and a new performance Smash It Up which is inspired by the destruction of the Newport Chartist mural, and reflects on how auto-destructive art can paradoxically protect threatened cultures through acts of wrecking and obliterating.
The recent exhibition at National Museum, Cardiff ‘Silent Explosion: Ivor Davies and Destruction in Art’, and the touring theatre production Smash It Up by Mr and Mrs Clark, both stimulate a contemplation of the past and the future. What is so distinctive is that they place the spectator in a variety of time frames in order to explore the relationship between art and the process of destruction, to experience André Stitt’s notion of ‘art as a hammer’. Both events also give distinctive and oblique angles on political action and activism.
Model Planes and a Library, Ivor Davies, childhood drawing from wartime Penarth.© Ivor Davies, courtesy Museum Wales
